


In Memoriam

by moonfleur



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Cyberpunk, Dystopia, Light Angst, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:56:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28930626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonfleur/pseuds/moonfleur
Summary: Ten remembers the exact moment he opens his eyes.He knows this is not a common phenomenon; most people don’t remember the moment of their birth after all.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Qian Kun
Comments: 29
Kudos: 70
Collections: Challenge #4 — Awaken The World





	In Memoriam

_I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember._

_— F. Scott Fitzgerald_

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Ten remembers the exact moment he opens his eyes.

He knows this is not a common phenomenon; most people don’t remember the moment of their birth after all. But Ten remembers opening his eyes to a room, one that is all cool metal, grey finishings and stone. The strangest part is that he is not inside it, if anything, he feels like he is all around it, like he can look down at it from above but also from all sides, at the same time.

There is a screen connected to the wall on one side of the room and Ten can _feel_ it, the electronic impulses coming from the screen, flooding his own senses with information. More than he should be able to process. But, what _should_ he be able to process. It is a strange sensation, of knowing your purpose and yet not knowing what you are, or who you are.

There is a man in the room too but he isn’t watching the screen or paying attention to the noise that seems to be coming from it. Noise? Voices? Words come flooding into Ten, like someone decided to upload an entire dictionary into his brain.

His brain? He isn’t sure but it feels like the little box in the wall the man seems to be fiddling with _is_ his brain. He can feel it, almost, like tingles or sparks of electricity all across his system. He wonders, for a moment, if maybe he _is_ the house.

One more spark, another line of code, and Ten is suddenly aware of his ability to speak or what he thinks is his equivalent of speaking? He’s not very sure, still, everything feels so new for him at the moment, unfamiliar. Although, when he looks at the man who is still slaving away at the panel in the wall, he feels a strange pull. Another spark, something like recognition.

He decides to test out his new skill for himself, makes a small noise emanate from what he thinks are the little boxes that hang in the corners of the room — all sleek and shiny and about as brand new as Ten feels — and the man startles, a hand on his chest as he looks around the room and then right at him, or the part of him that feels like he’s hovering over the man from the middle of the room.

“Hello?” The man calls out, his voice cautious but brimming with… something? Ten isn’t sure he knows the word for that yet, not when emotion seems to be a concept too foreign for him to understand.

“Hi,” he says softly, testing out the impulses and the lines of programming that he knows will allow his… voice?... to be heard through what he thinks is called the speaker system. It works, he can hear himself the same way he’d heard the man, but where the man’s voice had been full of warmth he finds his own falling just shy of that, thin and reedy, electrical impulses converted into audio waveforms the man can understand.

The man looks away from him (or rather the him that is above), and turns directly to the him that is right before him, built into the wall just above the panel (it is a strange feeling, being somewhat omnipresent). “Ten?” His fingers fiddle with the panel, but he is no longer doing anything to it, or none that Ten can feel anyway. “Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh god,” the man breathes, and Ten can only watch as his knees seem to buckle beneath him. He clutches onto the wall like it’s the only thing holding him up. His head thuds against the wall heavily as he collapses against it, hiding his face from all of Ten’s views. “It worked.”

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

It is only a few hours later that Ten finds out who the man is. Not because he asked him, even though he would have if the man had been in a good enough state for him to ask but he’d been silent since his quiet outburst, he’d done nothing except sit himself down on the plain two-seater couch with a cup of tea in his hand that he never drank.

No, Ten finds out when he realises that he’s connected to an entire network of information — the Web — along with every other electrical appliance in the house. He knows because he tested it, turned off the lights in the bedroom on the second floor.

He didn’t have to do much on the Web to find out though, just a couple of image searches using whatever Ten could see of the man’s face.

Qian Kun. The world’s foremost expert on Artificial Intelligence, the only one who’s been able to integrate an intelligence on a scale large enough into a machine. Something he’d only ever done once, apparently. He’d won a Nobel Prize for it, patented the technology, and then disappeared, refusing to give anyone access to his research.

Ten is curious. He has many questions. He is smart enough to know that he must be this Artificial Intelligence that Kun developed but, for some reason, all he can think about is why Kun stopped. Logically, it would have made no sense for him to.

He debates with himself for a minute, as much as his processors will let him anyway, before he decides to bite the proverbial bullet. “Kun?” He calls out, as gently as possible not wanting to startle the man.

It doesn’t work anyway, Kun jerks so hard he spills tea all over himself and the ground, the tea cup thankfully landing safely in lap instead of the concrete floor. He looks around eyes wide and… red? If Ten could frown he would be frowning right now, he knows that redness in the eyes can be a result of many things: allergies, chemicals, a virus even, but something tells Ten it is not either of those things.

Kun scrabbles to clean up the mess, reaches for the box of paper napkins in the middle of the table to wipe both himself and the ground as much as possible before placing the cup back on the table beside the pot. He looks at himself, at the wet patch in the middle of his t-shirt, before deciding to forego changing his shirt in favour of collapsing back onto the couch, an arm thrown over his eyes.

Ten feels a sudden urge to tell him to change, to get out of his wet clothes before he gets sick, but something holds him back and he wonders if there’s something in his programming that has him thinking of Kun’s wellbeing constantly.

He opts for an apology instead. “I’m sorry,” he says and Kun startles again but not as much as before. His hand falls away but his eyes remain closed and Ten can’t help but think he looks exceptionally tired. “For scaring you, Dr Qian.”

Kun sighs as he opens his eyes to look up at Ten, where he must be embedded in the ceiling. “It’s alright. You can— You can call me Kun.”

“If you insist then. Kun.”

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Kun, Ten soon realises, for all the news articles surrounding him and his apparent reclusivity, is anything but. The second floor of his tiny, open concept two-story apartment is taken up by an array of computers and highly advanced machinery on one side and a bed on the other. It is here that he spends most of his days, typing lines of code furiously into different terminals as he slides back and forth between them.

“You should take a break,” Ten chides on a particularly busy day, and Kun’s roller chair comes to a screeching halt mid slide.

“What?” Kun always has an unnerving way of knowing exactly which camera Ten seems to be using, and he whirls towards him, hair in a mess and his glasses askew. Ten feels a phantom ache to fix his glasses but he files that away as more advanced programming Kun’s been trying to work into his system.

Ten makes what a soft clicking noise. “I said, you should take a break. You’ve been at it since you woke up and I don’t think you got up to use the bathroom even once. Now, take a break before I shut down all your computers.”

Kun glares at him as he runs a hand through his hair in a poor attempt to tame it. “You can’t do that.”

“Do what? Take over your computers and shut them down? Of course I can, you gave me access to them along with access to everything else in this house.”

“Remind me again why I did that?” Kun grumbles, pushing himself off his chair as he thumbs at his eyes. He still looks tired but there’s a bit more life in him now.

“So that you don’t die before you finish me?”

Kun freezes in his tracks halfway to the bathroom. “What makes you think you’re not done?”

“Because I can feel it every time you put me to sleep to modify my code. I may be artificial but I’m intelligent, Kun.”

Kun manages a little huff of laughter before he continues on into the bathroom. “You really are something else, Ten.”

If Ten had a mouth, he would be grinning. “I know. Now, go wash up. I’ll have some food synthesised by the time you’re done. Any preference today?”

“How about Thai?”

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Ten wants to ask. It’s been itching at him ever since he’d come across that article on Kun bowing out of the scientific community but he hasn’t found the right opportunity. Kun’s always too preoccupied with his work or too sad, and Ten finds that he especially doesn’t want to disturb Kun in those moments.

But now seems like the perfect time.

Kun has a guest over, someone he briefly introduced to Ten as Sicheng — a smart-looking man, bespectacled like Kun but with much sharper features. Ten looks him up and finds that Sicheng is like Kun, also a scientist, but one who deals in the physical, in robots and other forms of mechanical engineering. Ten can’t help but wonder if the only people Kun knows are scientists.

It is the first time Ten has ever seen Kun interact with another human in a way that isn’t over holocall and Ten finds himself fascinated. They’re definitely familiar with each other, if the way Kun smiles at him is anything to go by, or the way Sicheng squeezes Kun’s shoulder gently when he offers to take care of the dishes.

Kun seems softer like this, edges smoothed out where that once used to be jagged lines and for a moment he even looks happy. It is a nice look on him, Ten decides.

When Sicheng returns from doing the dishes with two glasses of wine, Ten decides to take the chance. “Kun?” He calls out before they can slip back into their conversation.

Kun glances up at him over the rim of his glass where it’s already resting on his lips. “Hm?”

“Can I ask you something?” Sicheng glances at him then, a wariness in his eyes. “Why did you leave?”

Ten sees Kun tighten his fingers around the glass and he wonders for a split second if he made a mistake, if he should have remained quiet instead. But then Kun relaxes his grip and takes a sip before placing the glass down carefully on the table.

“Why did I leave what?”

“I looked you up, that first day when I didn’t know who you were. They said you were a genius, the only person who’s ever successfully created self-learning AI. Why did you give that up?”

Kun and Sicheng exchange a look that Ten can’t quite place — human emotions are still a mystery to him — but Sicheng merely raises an eyebrow and Kun sighs, accepting defeat.

“It was… Difficult. For me. People were expecting too much. They wanted me to sell my technology but that was never my intention. It was only supposed to be a small thing, a pet project.” He lets out a mirthless laugh and Sicheng glances at him in concern. “The world isn’t ready for this yet, technology like this.”

“You mean me? Because that’s what I am, right? The AI you were working on.”

“Yes. And no.” Kun buries his face in his hands and Sicheng places a hand on his back in comfort. “You’re different. Leagues ahead of the technology that won me the Nobel Prize.”

“Then what are you so afraid of, Kun? This is your life’s work.”

Kun doesn’t say anything.

It is only later that Ten gets his answer, when Sicheng is leaving, slipping into his shoes by the front door. He glances up towards the second floor where Kun has already been put to bed before he looks directly at the camera beside him. At Ten.

“Do you really want to know what he’s afraid of?” Sicheng asks, the look on his face far from the happy man who had walked in hours ago. “He’s afraid of losing you.”

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Ten apologises and Kun forgives him. Neither of them mention what Sicheng said even though Ten is sure Kun knows.

They fall into a rhythm. Ten wakes Kun up at exactly eight in the morning every day, Kun will go for a job but not before Ten nags at him for going out without protection from the pollution that sinks deeper and deeper over the city every day.

When Kun returns, Ten will have food ready in the synthesiser, whatever Ten feels like because Kun has long since relinquished that decision to Ten who should ‘know best’. What this really means is that Ten gets to synthesise the strangest combinations of food for Kun who will have no choice but to eat it.

It becomes a cycle; Kun works and Ten keeps him from working himself to death. It works well, until it doesn't.

Ten starts to malfunction.

He doesn't know what the tipping point was but one day, he is in the middle of synthesising coffee when something sparks in his receptors and he is hit with an image of a cup of coffee. Except it isn't in a standard issue synthesised cup, it is in a glass, and iced, and… outside. He can see the sky overhead before the image fizzles out like it never existed.

"Kun!" Ten calls out and Kun comes skidding down the stairs even though he could have responded from upstairs.

"I smelt something burn," Kun says panting and when Ten checks, the synthesised coffee is nothing more than a mess of chemicals on the synthesiser pad. Kun looks between the synthesiser and Ten. "What happened?"

"I think… I think something's wrong."

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

It happens more and more frequently from then on. Ten will get flashes of images that seem random; a beach, the inside of a car, Kun sitting in a kitchen that isn't the one he lives in now, a library, sunlight falling in through day curtains flapping in a breeze.

Ten thinks he's being hacked into, someone feeding him images to interrupt his programming because every single time it happens, something else in the house will break down. He nearly scalds Kun in in shower once, nearly disconnects Kun's entire network of computers another time. But Kun doesn't agree. In fact, he says nothing about it at all.

"Kun," he says one night. "What's going to happen to me?"

Kun turns to look at him and Ten can see just how tired he's become. His cheeks have become sunken and the shadows under his eyes are the worst Ten's ever seen. Kun twitches and for a moment Ten thinks he's reaching for him, to hold him, but the moment disappears as fast as it had come leaving Ten with an odd, hollow feeling.

Kun wheels his chair over to the camera Ten is looking out through. He places a hand on the wall beside the camera and his forehead against the lens. It's the closest Kun has ever been to him, the only time Ten's been able to see his tears. "Nothing. Nothing's going to happen to you. I'll fix it. I promise."

Then he pulls the plug.

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

Ten remembers the exact moment he opens his eyes.

His real eyes this time. Or as real as they can be anyway. He's in an unfamiliar room this time, hooked up to machines that line his cot on both sides and even the wall at the far end. Lines of code scrawl across the multiple screens but he can no longer understand them.

Movement beside him catches his attention and he looks down to find Kun, face buried in his arms as he dozes on the edge of the cot. Recognition hits him ten-fold because he _knows_ Kun now. The glitches in his memory from before form complete images, a whole life, maybe a multitude of lives. He no longer knows.

He reaches for Kun, because he can now, can run his fingers through his hair like he knew he'd wanted, even trapped as he was in that box he knew what longing was. Gold glints on his fourth finger, gold to match the one on Kun's and he chokes on a breath, feeling for the first time in a long time.

"Kun," he breathes. His voice sounds like his again and he nearly chokes up again.

Kun stirs, slow at first until he realises what he's looking at. _Who_ he's looking at. And then Ten's hands are in his and Kun is crying, tears warm against his skin as he presses kisses into his knuckles.

"It worked."

01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I've been wanting to write a sci-fi/AI fic for a while so I hope you enjoyed what I managed to cobble together.
> 
> And, yes, the synthesiser was inspired by Star Trek.
> 
> Find me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/moonfleur_) or [curious cat](http://curiouscat.me/moonfleur_) ♥︎


End file.
